The company behind Penfolds spent a decade buying wine brands. Now it is cutting three quarters of them - and betting the whole business on the bottles people are willing to pay the most for.
Offset is a Napa Valley company that pairs a direct-to-consumer ecommerce platform built specifically for fine wine with a brand design studio. Formed in 2015 from the merger of Byron Hoffman's design firm Hoffman & Co. and the development shop 750 Group, Offset gives wineries and fine-wine merchants both the software to sell - allocations, clubs, open cart and point of sale - and the identity, packaging, and storytelling to stand out. Clients range from legacy estates like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, and Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant to new producers such as RAEN.
Preferabli is an AI-driven B2B2C product discovery and recommendation software platform for wine, beer, spirits and other sensory consumer products. Formerly Wine Ring, the company pairs proprietary, patented machine-learning models with the world's largest assembled group of Masters of Wine and Master Sommeliers to predict what an individual will actually like - then plugs that prediction into retailers, hotels and merchants across roughly 100 countries.